Here's How Much Practice You Need to Become the Best in the World
Are you a specialist or a generalist? The answer can tell you something about how well you are learning and improving your skills.
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What does it take to become the best at something? The answer may not lie in early childhood practices or focused, lifelong dedication. Instead, the path to great skills may look much better. like wandering.
This is according to the new article, published today in Sciencewhich seeks to untangle what it takes to succeed in different disciplines, from sport from chess to classical music. Paradoxically, the performers who showed the most promise in their discipline as children rarely reached the pinnacle of their skill as adults.
The findings undermine the “10,000-hour rule”—the idea that if someone spends 10,000 hours consciously practicing a skill, they will master it, said Brooke McNamara, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University who co-authored the new analysis. Rule popularized in the book emissions, Malcolm Gladwell, based on 1993 study the best student violinists. Each of these students had accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice by age 20. However, they were not world-class performers, McNamara notes.
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“Compared to their national-level peers (those who are very good but not the best), world-class performers often take up the discipline later,” she explains. They tend to be involved in several disciplines early on and do not excel at one at a particularly young age. “They accumulated less practice in their discipline and more practice in other disciplines, and then rose to the top relatively late,” McNamara says.
“This pattern is inconsistent with the idea of deliberate practice theory or the 10,000 hour rule, which suggest that starting early and maximizing deliberate practice is the path to elite performance,” she adds.
The results came as a surprise to Zach Hambrick, study co-author and professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “I remember thinking, 'This is crazy,'” he says. “I had never thought about the relative merits of training in one discipline versus training in multiple disciplines. Expertise is, by definition, specific.”
It's important to note that results don't mean you don't need to practice or make an effort become a chess grandmaster or Wimbledon winner. Instead, they show that the best adults tend to be “late bloomers,” McNamara says.
For example, in sports, world-class athletes peak later than national-class athletes. Those who peak early reach a level that is best for their age, but not as high as what the other group will eventually reach later in life.
The results are intriguing, says Edson Filho, an assistant professor of sport, exercise and performance psychology at Boston University who was not involved in the study. He notes that in some sports, such as gymnastics, athletes reach peak performance much earlier than in others, and the analysis does not take into account other factors, such as money and training, that can influence who becomes the best player.
The study highlights that people change. Children may get burned out or simply lose interest. To become an expert, he says, you need to consistently perform at a high level under the most challenging conditions. “It's a long journey.”
The results have implications for schools and coaches, who may be inclined to focus resources on children who show the most early promise in a particular area rather than on those who have the greatest potential to achieve world class levels. The study also has a message for people who want to pursue their skills or dreams but haven't won school competitions or reached the top of their youth league: don't despair, McNamara says.
“To the people who didn’t follow the path of the prodigy, know that you are in good company!” she says. “Most world-class performers haven’t done it either.”
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